Posts Tagged ‘Tiger Woods’

Tiger Woods apology and press conference yesterday went off without a glitch except for a couple of nervous stops in the beginning. He tried to talk about everything a reporter would have wanted to question him. His mom was present and his wife’s family, he even thanked Accenture, and the golfing community for understanding the timing of his apology.

The read out speech asking for atonement, telling the Paparazzi to stay away from his family and saying he was sorry thrice was all very well.

In celebrity reputation management terms, Tiger did all that he needed to do, touching upon spirituality and Buddhism and his therapy and the millions of kids who idolized him – he said it all!

But I wasn’t moved, there were tears and he touched on all aspects, yet watching it one was left with questions of how it seemed only rehearsed.

• This is a man who was an expert in leading a double life and perpetuating a holier-than-thou persona off the golf course.
• The Tiger brand thrived on his presumed golden image – the star with no faults –  a star like no other.

The extent of the damage on the Tiger Woods brand to me seemed more evident yesterday in the public apology. Again we are not talking about the golfer Tiger Woods but the brand which projected him as the ideal on and off the field.

Tiger is definitely not out of the woods yet, with his problems or image, the public still feel cheated and only time and a phenomenal comeback in the game can really solve this.

Conclusion: For now this ‘mea culpa’ can be only termed as the tiniest step in rebuilding his brand. The golfing circuits need the Tiger brand back and up; after all he is the one who brings in the crowds!

Recently we have been contacted by companies being hit hard by Google Query Suggestions. If you are not sure what these are, when you start typing words into Google, it will come back with suggestions as you type. See example below:

So sounds harmless enough?  I am sure it was intended to be,  if you check out Google’s Query Suggestion page

Why it’s helpful

• Rest your fingers.
  Need to do a big search on a tiny keyboard? Suggestions come in real-time, so typing [ great w ] and clicking ‘great wall of china’ is faster and easier than typing it out.
• Catch a mistake.
  Did you mean: Melbourne Australia? Start searching for [ melborn ], say, and Google Suggest will offer more common spellings for what you might be trying to find.
• Skip a page; save some time.
  If Google detects that a specific site is relevant to the search you’re typing, we’ll provide a link straight to it, so you don’t have to wait for the search results page. If a link is to a site in our adversiter network, it’ll appear in a colored box labeled ‘Sponsored Link.’
• Repeat a favourite search.
  If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, we may show some suggestions based on searches you’ve done in the past. You can tell a suggestion is from your history if it has a Remove link next to it.

Splitting the atom, scientists at first looked at this as a way to generate power efficiently, of course it didn’t take long for some people to look at how they can use it for weapons of mass destruction.   Guess what?  Some people are now looking at query suggestions as a weapon of mass destruction to a company’s reputation.

So how can this very innocent feature that google introduced become a company killer?  The search query is set off when when people start searching for specific keyword terms, so for example people searching for Olympics will start adding specific years.  Google picks up on this and starts to offer it as suggestions.

If you have a large number of customers and some of them have had a bad experience, then they may start looking for a way to complain and start searching terms like “Your Company Name + Complaints”, enough people start doing it and it can soon become a Google suggested query.   Even worse is someone could add a few negative comments about your company in a forum and before you know it not only is Google now making negative suggestions but also the negative forums are now showing up for your company name or brand quite often above your own site.  Look what happened to Tiger Woods in a very short time.

So it won’t take long for unscrupulous competitors to catching on to this and start seeding such search quires.   Once it takes hold it will be very difficult and costly to fix in both time and effort.

Another issues that can cause you problems is your business model, if you ask for money upfront people are incredibly suspicious.  We have had several companies approach us about this exact problem, a potential customer will type search terms like “Company Name + Scam” or “Company Name + Hoax” again it does not take many of the same searches to trigger Google’s suggested query and now you have a massive online reputation problem.  Follow this up with a few negative comments in a forum or a site like scam.com and it could cost you your business.

Make sure you are on top of you customer complaints procedure before issues get out of hand.  If you product is not up to scratch don’t be surprised if it does not take long for Google to pick up on this.  We have managed to help companies reputation online by introducing certain procedures to reduce and water down the impact once negative suggested queries started to effect their business.

Taking a proactive approach will help defend your company name, brands and reputation online, make sure you listen to customers and remember to show that you have.  A journalist cannot follow a story if you have shown you heard the problems and are addressing them.  If you bury your head in the sand then it will be a very costly exercise.

When searching for ‘Tiger Woods’ on Google it didn’t bring up his official website, but something rather spicy to be precise.

Woods reputation has taken a beating no doubt, and now his announcement about indefinite leave from golf will further make matter worse. Companies and products that Woods endorse are caught sitting ducks. A rough estimates shows an already loss to incur is around $12 billion.

The positive reputation he has worked years to attain now shows above his official website.  Being a celebrity your reputation is always at the crossroads and anything can hit you.  Strangely in Mr. Woods’s case it was a (mysterious) accident.

It may be noted that before the accident Tiger Woods enjoyed 85% positive sentiments on social media. Interestingly a week post-accident it did not plunged to a very low either as a sudden impact.  This was the ideal time to capitalize and minimize the damage, if only Mr. Woods had believed in Reputation Management.

With no proper damage control plan in place it was all expected. Surprisingly the reaction from the Woods clubhouse has been too slow and hazy. Tiger should realize that ‘No press is tantamount to Bad press‘ and he took his own time to clear the air. Meanwhile internet and the social media websites were flooded with more negative comments thus creating its own crisis. Negative comments later jumped to 40% from 15%, while the positive sentiment was at an all time low of 14%.

This whole affair will cost the golfer $100 million a year in endorsement income. Too late for the Tiger to be out of the woods if only he knew- “It takes hundreds of good golf shots to gain confidence, but only one bad one to lose it” -  Jack Nicklaus .

Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs is no stranger to social networking and is the highest followed person in India on Twitter. Tharoor in fact popularised Twitter in India to a great extent with his now controversial Tweets and was even named “Twitteroor” for his political gaffes as far as his political party’s stances were concerned.

The minister is intellectual, tech-savvy and popular with the masses and has 537,478 followers on Twitter when this post was written. The problem with Tharoor is that his Tweets are a source of both admiration and political uproar at the same time. Even as he endears himself to the youngsters, the geriatric members of his often sycophantic Congress party look at him as an up-start of sorts.

That Tharoor was in the initial stages a close rival to the UN Secretary-General post of Ban Ki Moon and that he has numerous books to his name all accord him a celebrity status. What I like about him the most is his constant attempts at making his countrymen laugh at themselves. Here he is back in the news for tweeting against his own government’s tightening of tourist visas to India. This is what he tweeted -

Dilemma of our age: tough visa restrictions in hope of btr (better) security or openness & (and) liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.

When asked about the economy class of Air India he famously tweeted -

“absolutely, in cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!”

The slang was lost on most people in India and when he added the holy cows all hell broke loose.

That he has huge plans for his country and is not afraid to speak his mind and even against his own government makes him stand apart. But then these days how the mighty fall ( Tiger Woods) and before you know it, courting controversy can finally catch up. The minister sure needs some expert reputation management for continuing his work well and to be in the good books of the old war horses in the Congress party.

Being a busy man he needs the services of an army of experts to help him with online reputation management and being a celebrity and a politician the need only magnifies manifold.

Google’s real time search integration into searches is for the time being giving its 6 minutes of fame to anyone who is active on Twitter. Go out there blog about anything topical and before you know BAM you’re in the first five on Google news searches.

The good thing about this is that you can really get a lot of people reading what you want them to read. So if you’re a Tiger Woods you should be out there with expert reputation management guys telling the world that you messed up big time, that you’re seeing a top shrink to handle your “addiction” and that you plan to be back on top of the game in 2010.

The bad thing about this real-time search integration that Google has begun is that, if you have a disgruntled customer, employee, spouse, agent, patient or fan you could be in a blitz of bad press within minutes. Scary? Definitely!

The call for reputation management has just turned into a shout. You need to have daily PR out there as defenders with positive news and content. It’s a minefield out there, more so now.

Tiger Woods is really stuck between a hard place and a rock, no matter what he does now people will have a different opinion of the golfing superstar.  His reputation has been tested and how he responds over the next few weeks will be critical for hi public image.

Of course the difference between bad press in the newspaper and online is it tends to die away after a while, however on the net it just stays there and quite often attracts more responses and comments.  We don’t mind Tiger having an issue at home, actually it’s quite refreshing to know everyone goes through rough patches, but how you deal with it is important.

He should have just been honest from the start and owned up to it all, no one would attack him for that.  Don’t try and spin it or hide from it, it just makes people more curious and delve deeper, worst of all people will loose there trust in Tiger.

Now there is talk he won’t be golfing till 2010, not sure that’s the best approach either, he should just pick yourself up and get on with what he’s good at.  This will inspire people again and show truly how good a sports player he really is.